Higher education, practice, and development
Research on teaching within professional programmes is limited, yet crucial for both quality learning in general and for issues of accessibility in particular.
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There is a need to develop more integrated approaches to broadening participation as well as to develop domain-related academic literacies, in line with international trends. Such work must be done in close collaboration with staff teaching on the programmes, developed based on existing research, and adapted and tested in the local context. Several development projects within MDU academies in the past year have identified, for instance, assignment instructions and linguistic assessment as crucial to student success, and more work of this nature will be undertaken.
To ensure high quality teaching at MDU, structures and frameworks for teaching excellence have been developed to further the pedagogical competencies of lecturers. This is an additional area of research as a component in strategic development of programmes at MDU.
Ongoing research projects
Within this theme, practical projects in close collaboration with teaching staff will be pursued, combined with research on the nature of pedagogical achievement and scholarship of teaching and learning, and research on current pedagogical challenges.
Project manager at MDU: Åsa Ryegård
In recent decades, a lot has been written, studied and debated about Education for Sustainable Development. There is no general agreement around the concept (Wals 2009), with focus and content being described as a movement from mere what and why to questions about how (Vare & Scott, 2007).In the literature, the need for education that leads to key competencies is stressed (Wiek et al, 2011; UNESCO, 2017), but there is little about the kind of education that supports students’ development of these competences.
Project manager at MDU: Madelaine Johansson